Some British weather terms. You know, for good local character for your next story set in the isles. (Grokked from Jay Lake)

Uh-oh, the secret is out. There is a Hollywood Formula and it seems a lot of movies are following it… page for page. And that's the problem with formulas. The people who understand know that they're more like guidelines (read that in a Geoffrey Rush voice). But when the bean-counters and MBA suits get ahold of it, bammo! Gotta follow the formula until the milk that sucker dry. This even came up at Comic Con. To understand a little about this (in a novel writing sorta way), I recommend the Writing Excuses episode with Lou Anders where he explains the formula. (Pointed to by Dan)

Need the ambiance of a coffee shop, but don't really need the baristas giving you the stink eye for nursing one cup for three hours. Well, now you can have the sound effects to help your writing. (Grokked from Dr. Doyle)

Jay Lake has been sharing photos of Comic-Con. I point this post out because of my undying love for that bottom photo. My black little scribner's heart want to see this at every Westboro Baptist protest.

SOme of the damage that can be done by preaching the sexual purity gospel. And don't for a second believe it isn't intended. "In case you were wondering, no, this isn’t healthy, and the result of these teachings has been a generation of Christian youth with warped and toxic ideas about sex, dating, and even their own bodies." (Grokked from the Slactivist)

2 comments:

Thanks for the link to Grubb's HPL piece--I think it's just about perfect.

I love much of Lovecraft's work: he was an utter master of structure and (though it may seem ironic) verisimilitude. The opening chapter of The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward, with its interweaving of real New England history/geography and utter myth is a wonderful lesson plan for anyone who wants to write horror fantasy set in something like the real world. "The Call Of Cthulhu" is a masterpiece of onionskin plotting, wherein the story isn't so much a line or thread as it is a peeling back of one layer after another until you come to the center. (Spherical plotting?)

But he was a racist. A horrific racist. A grade-A nuclear racist nutbag. In addition to things like the awful poem Grubb links to, HPL wrote things like "The Horror At Red Hook" (wherein we learn immigrants are degenerate subhumans trying to wreck America with their degenerate subhumanity) and ghost-wrote things like "Medusa's Coil" where the ultimate horror beyond horror is revealed to be (I kid you not) miscegenation.

Whitewashing that (what an unfortunate expression in this context) is fundamentally dishonest. There's no gloss, no excuse. As Grubb suggests, Lovecraft was bad even by the standards of his place and era. (And should place and era be excuses anyway?) And too many Lovecraft fans and even HPL critics and scholars turn a blind eye or try to paper over it, which is simply wrong.

Having written a bit about Orson Scott Card's bigotry lately, I've found myself thinking about why my attitude towards GdT's Mountains Of Madness is different (if it ever gets made; which I doubt, since I think Pacific Rim is meant to scratch GdT's Lovecraftian monster itch). And I have to admit that one factor, quite simply, is that Lovecraft is extremely dead; if he were still around, I'd have to consider whether I really wanted to line his pockets, however indirectly. If Card were pining for the fjords, so to speak, I might not be as dead-set about not seeing Ender's Game, though the fact I thought it was a kind of lousy novel would also affect my decision.

Eric, I think you hit on a few of the point that I think make the difference here. Buying and reading HPL's works don't enrich him. Also, because of his allowing his works (for what became the Cthulhu Mythos cycle) to go into what we would now label as a Creative Commons license, other writers have attempted to correct HPL's poor humanity traits by expanding his world. OSC on the other hand stands to directly benefit from the sale of both Ender books and movies.

And while I agree with Scalzi's take on the issue of boycotting authors/creators with whom you politically disagree, I do think the creations do matter and are more important than the creator's politics. This is mostly from the perspective of being a creator and how my work, while it flows from me, is not me. What some of my characters say and do or believe doesn't have to (and often doesn't) reflect my own beliefs.

And in that vein, I don't believe that going to see the movie or reading OSC's book is going to subtly convert young people to flaming anti-homosexualism. Although I do agree with many of the moral failings you pointed out in your essays.

One final point on HPL, Elizabeth BEar has an amazing story called Shoggoths in Bloom. And, IIRC, her main character is not only an African American, but a college professor who deals with the still occurring racism of the NE maritime areas. So she consciously runs roughshod over HPL's racism, exposes it, and subverts it.

About Me

I am a writer of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction. Here you can find some of my thoughts about writing, politics, society, dreams, and anything that comes into my head. Sometimes I drop a Story Bone or two. And then there is the tweeting.

The opinions expressed on this blog are my own and should not be considered the opinions of my employers or clients.

Da Rules

Anything put in a post with the title "Story Bone" is up for grabs. If it sets off a story bomb in your head, go for it. I don't claim any right except to maybe write my own story based on the bone. I haven't researched the bones to make sure I'm not trodding on somebody else's toes so use at your own risk. Think of these as free ideas.

Freed Scribblings

The Company of Ravens - First Chapter This is the story that nearly killed me and forced me to start writing down these things in my head. It's still a draft. After innumeral edits this is still at the point I realized I needed more skills to tell the story, and also the point where I realized I could do this.

The Dead Are Busy Released from the trunk in celebration of the first International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, April 23, 2007.

Storming Heaven This was the first short story I wrote that I felt was ready for publication. Released from the trunk in celebration of the second International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, April 23, 2008.